In today's commercial brooder houses, young turkey poults are maintained in brood pens for several days and are fed from shallow open top feed pans. The feed becomes contaminated with bedding material and fecal matter when the turkeys walk into and around in the feed pans. The open top feed pans must also be refilled once or twice a day in a continuous operation in large brooder houses. After the turkey poults reach an age of approximately one week they are removed from the brood pens and allowed to roam freely through the brooder house where they feed from automatic feed delivery systems. The automatic feed systems consist of a screw conveyor
which delivers feed to a multitude of open circular feed pans. The birds are small enough for several weeks to climb into the feed pans where they contaminate the feed and block access to the feed for most other poults.